My participation in MIND TRAIL Oku-Yamato Museum in Your Mind in Tenkawa, Nara, in 2021 led me to consider how the scenery before us is recognised as landscape. While listening to stories connected with the area, I became interested in mitate: the act of perceiving one thing as another. Through mitate, an unfamiliar “something” is recognised as a particular thing and begins to acquire meaning.
Here I saw the mountains of Tenkawa, long traversed, cherished and feared by those who lived among them. I regarded the upright trees and moss-covered fallen trunks as mountain ranges and placed several fields of colour through the forest. The gradation from green to blue and white abstractly evokes mountains, sky, and the vapour and mist rising from the forest after rain.